As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to networked and shared-resource technologies, such as cloud computing. Further, there is an increasing amount of data being stored remotely, such that data centers are increasingly expanding the amount of storage capacity and related resources. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud or across a network, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources.
In many instances, a customer will require more than one resource, such as a computing device, server, or other computing or processing device, to perform portions of an operation. As the number of customers increases, and the average number of resources per customer increases, there is a corresponding need to increase the available number of resources. In a data center context, this can mean adding many additional racks of servers. In order to accommodate the additional resources, the portion of the data center network that connects those resources to the external network needs to scale accordingly. Such a network can require thousands of connections upon deployment, and the number can increase exponentially upon scaling to a larger deployment. In addition to the significant cost of purchase and installation, the large number of connections increases the likely number of connections that are made incorrectly, and thus can affect the performance of the network.